Fantasy Premier League (FPL) Lessons on Building Products
The English Premier League is the most-watched sports league in the world, broadcasts to over 600 million homes and a potential TV audience of around 5 billion people. 20 Football teams play 38 games against each other throughout the year and the one with most points wins the league. (Wikipedia)
Fantasy Premier League (FPL) is a game where you select 15 players from different teams under a $100m budget. Each player is rated as per their ability and performance and there are various other rules that you can check here. Every week, as the players score or assist or get clean sheets, the teams accumulate points. There are public and private leagues where one can compete with friends. Around 7 million people play this game every year!
I have been playing FPL on and off for over a decade. I did really well in a couple of seasons (Overall ranks 5k and 12k), but lately, I’ve been unlucky (a euphemism for average) and hasn’t managed a sub-100k rank.
In this blog, I try to point out some similarities between product creation and FPL and the things that I have learnt from FPL over the years.
Look at data all the time to make decisions
While building the team, players spend a lot of time exploring historical data. The number of points scored, goals, assists, points per match, bonus, expected goals, expected assists, scores at home, scores away, scores against oppositions, minutes played, cards, chances created, value, selected by etc. Even though the north star is to get the maximum number of points, players still go deeper into all set of numbers to build a stronger sense of what could happen. Without this, the game becomes a pure lottery. Being able to grasp so much data for so many players regularly is a differentiated skill.
Product building is the same. You look at all kinds of historical trends and numbers to increase the predictability of your decisions. The past numbers are no guarantee of future results, but on the spectrum of success and failure, this preparedness moves the decisions more towards the success of the decisions. Also, with time, the ability to comprehend more data becomes easy and the understanding of which variable is impacting more gets better as well. Thus, decisions continue to shift to the right. Can someone play totally blind and still achieve success? Theoretically yes, but with a much lower probability.
Looking at the relevant metrics and observing environmental factors
Every game week, the numbers change. Some players only focus on their fixed numbers like form (number of points scored in last 3/4 games) or total points. If looking at only form and building a team would be a sure shot win then the one who led in first 4 games could continue using the same formula and end up winning at the end of 38th. But that’s not true. Being able to understand the metrics with the context of the environment is a waste. Some of those factors are fixture difficulty, change in players position, transfer news, change in coach, injuries, Non-league matches (Champions league, international friendlies) etc. Without the awareness of these, the decisions purely on the basis of historical numbers will push the decisions towards failure on the spectrum.
In product building, being unaware of the environment does the same. If someone didn’t believe it at the start of 2020, the year has made sure that everyone believes it. Understanding what’s happening in the market that changes user’s behaviour is critical. For certain industries, having deep know-how of compliance is critical, understanding competition is critical. There is no book or formula to crack this problem but the internet is your friend. Read as much as possible, interact with creators in the field, be active in the communities, follow the right set of people on twitter and you will hope that you have a good sense of understanding on the environmental changes.
Past is hardly a guarantee for the future. Trust your process
You captain a less known player who ends up scoring a hattrick. You get a flurry of points and get ahead of all your friends in the mini-league. For the next 4 games, you continue to keep that player as the captain till you get almost no points from the coming matches. And your realise that totally going out of your process didn't help you.
The number of factors involved in the success of your product is way too many. Sometimes you can gain sudden success of failure suddenly because of a factor that you are not able to attribute to. Try your best to find the reason behind it and try to incorporate that in your process to either continue the sudden success or to avoid the failure. Don’t take it as a magic pill. As a product creator, as said above, creating decision making predictability through experimentations is more important than finding gems in the field.
Intuition is important, almost always. Data is the protein behind the muscle memory!
In the end, FPL (like startups) is a game of tradeoffs. Players only get 100m$ to pick 15 players. You can’t play more than 3 strikers, you can’t play less than 3 defenders. You have all information like everyone else, and you make your choices. In the end, you have to pull the plug on the final list of players and use some of your intuition on what will work and what will not. Salah or Mane, KDB or Sterling and many such decisions are left to intuition.
While building products, one needs to remember that the desire to build more predictability through research and data, as discussed above, should not become a major hindrance for execution and speed. Some product managers get into analysis paralysis and cold feet while deciding on what to build. This over preparedness should be used wisely.
Winners need serendipity too. But can’t rely on that all the time.
A bad game week isn’t failure, a great game week isn’t success. It’s a marathon.
Fantasy premier league goes on for almost the whole year. Even the top fantasy players have average and below-average game weeks. The winner of the season isn’t at the top of the table every single game week. It’s important to remember that consistency is more important that peaks. Of course, we go into most game weeks feeling that we will get a 100 pointer, but it seldom happens.
Product creation is iterative! I differ with those who believe that having a fancy idea and creating a one-time fancy product defines big success. It’s a marathon, week by week we build, we understand what’s going right and what’s going wrong and continue to course-correct as we go.
As Brian Chesky said —
Our overnight success took 1000 days
Your big bets (captain) will give you a safety net
Players choose a captain every game week and the points of the captain are doubled. Once in the season, they are allowed to use a triple captain chip where the points are tripled. There are some other chips that can be used once every season. These are the big bets, the best players use these chips and captains extremely carefully and with a lot of deliberation. They give them the extra push at the right time. Pick a triple captain who is in form and has a double game week against week opponents at home, it’s likely that the player will give over 50 points in that game week.
While we iterate and experiment creation, at times you have some insights or feature in your armour which you expect to give you great returns. Use them wisely. Make sure that you time these well, make sure you launch them well, make sure you market them well, make sure you target these well with the right segments. The big bet features or experiments that are backed by your data and research and feedbacks can help you gain massive momentum, don’t do a half baked job at them.
Your short term execution strategy should be very clear and medium-term flexible
FPL only allows players to make 1 change every week. For every extra change, they get a deduction of 4 points. So, players can change the whole 15 players, but it will be -56 points, which is generally around the average points scored by the team. Twice the season, they get a wildcard to change the whole team. That’s why it’s essential to use transfers and substitutes keeping next 3–4 games in mind. If the team is only focused on the next game week, but not after that the chances are that the scoring will average out. Also, having a good sense of when to use wildcards helps. If players use wildcards in panic, they don’t generate much value out of it.
Short term execution clarity goes a long way. Also, the beauty is that when there is short term execution clarity it doesn’t feel great but the absence of it feels disastrous. Teams have no understanding of what is being built, why it is being built, what are the dependencies etc. That’s why making sure that there is good clarity for 2–4 weeks at least. However, on a medium-term, there should be enough flexibility to make changes as more feedback is received. This flexibility helps to stop features that might not be giving the kind of results we expected.
Without differentials, it will be difficult to leap ahead
FPL needs risk taking and making tough choices. You have $100m to pick 15 players, most big names are around $9–12m, you take 5 of them and you are left with $50m to pick up 10 players. That’s where the differentials come in. These are players with low cost and possible high returns. Some of them are owned by less than 1% of the overall players and that’s what makes them interesting. Pick up a couple of these and they may push you up the table if the cards work.
A very important question every product creator needs to keep asking is ‘Why would a user leave her current habit and start using our product instead?’. There is no dearth of products in the market, both online and offline. Without differentiation in experience, or pricing or general problem solving, it is near impossible to bring stickiness to a product. Hence, differentials!
In the end, it’s a game. No fun if you are not enjoying it or taking it way too seriously. Thanks, Also, this year I am taking a break from FPL, it takes way too much mind space. I’ll be back next year :)
